Who better to impart life lessons than the only defense secretary in U.S. history to screw up two wars at once? True to confident form, that's what Donald Rumsfeld attempts in his new book on leadership, Rumsfeld's Rules. He actually has good advice -- so much that you really wish he would have taken some of it at the Pentagon.
Any book about leadership is guaranteed to be filled with vapid aphorisms designed to make the salesman who forks over $27.99 at the airport bookstore feel like he can be George Patton. Rumsfeld's Rules, published today, is no different. But there are some jewels in here, befitting the experience of an octogenarian who was a congressman, a White House chief of staff, a chief executive of a massive pharmaceutical company and a two-time defense chief.
"If you expect people to be in on the landing, include them in the takeoff" is good advice. "When negotiating, never feel that you are the one who must fill every silence" is great advice. "We cannot ensure success, but we can deserve it" isn't exactly advice, but it's the kind of thing that gets you fired up to ace that meeting or take that hill, which is probably why George Washington said it in the first place.
But then there's the onslaught of irony that comes from any advice book written by a man whose name has become synonymous in defense circles with Epic Fail. "Those who think that they know, but are mistaken, and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge" is a pull quote in Rumsfeld's Rules attributed to Margaret Thatcher. It's also a serviceable epitaph for Rumsfeld's tenure at the Pentagon during a time when the Bush administration elected to invade Iraq based on (to be charitable) mistaken premises, diverting resources from the war against al-Qaida, ignoring an incubating insurgency in Afghanistan, and ultimately mismanaging all three efforts.
Rumsfeld's Rules are pretty famous. He began collecting bits of shopworn wisdom when he was a boy -- writing them down on notes he stuffed in a shoebox for safekeeping -- and President Gerald Ford asked him to distribute them to senior White House staff. Reporters and analysts dust off the Rules when Rumsfeld is back in the news, for whatever reason. Like Shaquille O'Neal, Rumsfeld is very quotatious.
Now he's collected them into a format you can take to the beach, but without much elaboration. Anyone who's interested in a defense of Rumsfeld's latter Pentagon tenure should probably read his memoir, since Rumsfeld doesn't spend much time in Rumsfeld's Rules defending his decisions or anticipating objections. That makes for a breezier read, but also heightens the tensile strength of irony that serves as the narrative's connective tissue.
"Those who worked with me at the Pentagon became highly skilled at knowing when to ask for guidance and when to handle a matter themselves," he writes during a section on the merits of delegating. "Because they paid attention to my patterns and views, they knew they were empowered to pass along my guidance to senior civilian and military leaders." Oh, you mean like in 2003, when the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility took the list of torturous "enhanced interrogation techniques" and gave it to the commander of the Iraq war for use at Abu Ghraib? If we're charitable toward Rumsfeld and believe that he didn't know any of that had happened, perhaps the real lesson is to be really careful about what "patterns and views" subordinates understand to be your priorities.
"A's Hire A's, B's Hire C's" is how Rumsfeld summarizes his insights on teambuilding. Sounds about right. "You go to war with the Army you have -- not the Army you might wish you have" is reprised in this book as a gem. You wouldn't know that quote earned Rumsfeld the ire of many an Iraq veteran after he said it to a soldier asking the defense secretary why his vehicle was insufficiently armored against insurgent bombs.
"Because a successful strategy requires time to achieve its stated goals, there are occasions when it takes tenacity and determination to stick with your chosen direction, even when it suffers setbacks or becomes unpopular. At the same time, good leaders understand the importance of not staying wedded to a course of action after new circumstances require a change." Where to begin with this? First, nothing here advises you about when you should change course. Perhaps more to the point, this is the guy who resisted increasing the size of the U.S. occupation force in Iraq as the war spiraled out of control. (Elsewhere in the book, Rumsfeld praises the troop surge he resisted, while taking credit for restructuring the Army as to make the surge possible.)
When dealing with the press, Rumsfeld cautions, never put out misleading information. "During the Bush administration, we took care that the information we put out was accurate," except apparently if it was about Saddam Hussein allying with al-Qaida or coming on the verge of a nuclear bomb or possessing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Or, for that matter, claiming to know exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were. "Trust leaves on horseback but returns on foot," he writes, all too accurately for his reputation.
Perhaps most amazingly, Rumsfeld quotes Richard Corliss for one of the most ironic Rules of all: "Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future." He's 100 percent right. Alas, had Rumsfeld not substituted an adherence to an outmoded view of high-tech warfare for the oft-forgotten wisdom that social networks are the crucial glue of an insurgency, Iraq might not have been as horrifically bloody.
But let's be real. Fashionable as it may be to remember Rumsfeld as History's Greatest Monster, Rumsfeld didn't screw up everything. He killed the Army's 40-ton self-propelled Howitzer system, the Crusader, for the sensible reason that it wouldn't be relevant in modern asymmetric warfare. When you strip away the gauzy technospeak, Rumsfeld's favored network-centric warfare has proven to be a huge battlefield advantage, giving individual soldiers access to vastly more data than they ever had before. Rumsfeld's aversion to nation-building in Afghanistan might have given the Taliban breathing space to reemerge, but can anyone really argue in 2013 that Rumsfeld's instincts there were wrong?
As you would expect from a book like this, there's a lot of cliche and treacle in Rumsfeld's Rules. ("America is not what is wrong with the world." Bold!) There's a whole chapter defending capitalism, as if capitalism didn't enjoy unrivaled economic hegemony. But Rumsfeld offers legitimate points of wisdom, if you can get over who's offering them. "The point here," Rumsfeld writes, "is that rules cannot be a substitute for judgment." Never has an author's life more precisely demonstrated that point.
